Archive trip: Tourraine, France
To get to the garment selection which is now pretty much finalised, I first went through all the images of past collections to get to a rather large first draft of an object list. This in hand, my project manager, two of our Yohji Yamamoto colleagues and I went south of Paris to the Yohji Yamamoto archives. They are kept by a family that has been working with the French Haute Couture industry for centuries. Due to the declining need for dyeing and craft skills for this industry, they have adapted and now hold the archives for a number of high fashion companies.
In this little french town, we dressed and photographed the preselected garments and additional ones we found in the archives. This served several functions for us: to document the dressing process and condition of the work, an image base I could use to tighten the selection later on and familiarise ourselves with the physicality of the pieces.
